Californium (23 page)

My jeans are loose, full of holes, and so faded they're almost white. Frontierland. New Frontierland? Maybe Tomorrowland since things are getting better every day, especially after tomorrow when Astrid sees me with the band.

We stop at a red light and Mr. Curtis says, “You guys make sure you stay buckled in.” He's looking at us in the rearview mirror, sort of serious. The light turns green and we roll forward, gentle and smooth. “You might not think seat belts are important. A lot of people don't. But a lot of people out there drive a little crazy.” He swerves into the left lane real fast. Cherise pushes up against Edie and Edie up against me, and we all laugh, even Mr. Curtis.

“Sorry,” Edie says as she scooches away from me.

“No, you're not,” I say and give her the same quick-smile she gave me.

For the rest of the ride every turn is sharp and fast, every lane change a jerk left or right. It's a roller coaster, everybody
wooing
and
aahing.
When Cherise points out her house we go just past it and Mr. Curtis says, “Hands up.” He stops hard without making the tires slide. We bend forward together, still laughing, and just as we start to relax, Mr. Curtis jams the car in reverse and hits the gas. My hands dip with the force of going backward, and when we stop all of a sudden, my left hand slaps onto Edie's thigh. You might think the scratch of Edie's jeans
wouldn't be all warm-glow electric fence like Astrid's silk panties, and it's not. It massages the palm of my hand and there's no imagining what her thigh might feel like; this
is
what it feels like—tight and maybe not warm through the material but perfectly curving into my palm and pulsing, like every atom in my hand is swirling around and trying to find something to bond with in those jeans.

It's going to be like Velcro prying my hand away from Edie, but it'll be weird if I don't. I raise my hand and grab the back of Keith's seat. I don't actually need to grab Keith's seat, so I'm leaning a little forward now, with one hand stretched out like somehow that's relaxing to me, which it isn't, and I'm feeling weird because I know it looks weird, and if I'm acting and looking weird, I must be weird, which, I guess, is better than looking like a perv.

Cherise laughs as she gets out, saying, “Thanks,” and “See you guys tomorrow.” Edie unbuckles and slides over into Cherise's seat, and I take my hand back.

The rest of the ride, Edie is, “Turn here,” “Not this street but the next,” and “You'll see a yellow Honda in the driveway.”

“Oh,” Mr. Curtis says. “Those are great cars.”

“It's my brother's,” Edie says. “He got it for college.”

Mr. Curtis brings the car to a smooth stop. “He'll save so much on gas it'll pay for itself in four years.”

Edie thanks Mr. Curtis for the ride and thunks the door shut. She walks in front of the car to get to her driveway and waves, sort of at Keith, or maybe all of us, as we pull away.

I'm staring out the window the rest of the ride home, my
hand tingling. This is my first thigh. And if Edie's thigh feels that good, Astrid's must be, what, the Promised Land? I try imagining Astrid's thighs. They're brown and smooth and disappearing into her cheerleading skirt. Then the skirt becomes blue jeans, only not hers, Edie's. Then it's Edie wearing her white shirt and puka shells and grinning at me like she knows what I'm doing. Even though it's all in my head, you'd think it would embarrass me, but somehow, I guess since it's Edie, it makes me laugh. I'm thinking,
You're Adventureland, not Fantasyland.
Edie rolls her eyes and grins and instead of getting the heart attack and jelly knees Astrid gives me, these nice warm waves roll out of my chest and down my arms and legs.

.

The TV is on as I come through the front door. “Reece,” my mom says. “Can you come here?”

My parents are on the couch and Packy flips off the TV with the remote. “Who won the game?” he says. When I hesitate, because I have no idea, Packy says real calm, “Have you been drinking?” I shake my head, partly because the answer is no, and partly because there's more words than I can say. Why does he keep asking that every weekend? What's he thinking?

“What about your friends?” Packy says. “Who drove?”

“Mr. Curtis drove,” I say and slide my hands into my jacket pockets. “I think he was high on angel dust, but he hadn't been drinking.”

“That's not funny,” Packy says.

“Reece,” my mom says. Her hair is down, pilled robe on,
freckles out. “Is everything okay?” Her hands are folded in her lap, resting over the top of something. It's hard to make it out in the dark of the living room; then the DikNixon logo filters through.

“Why do you have my notebook?”

“We found it,” Packy says and holds up
The Nixon Tapes.
“With this.”

“Found?”

“Well,” my mom says, “with the way you're dressing now and your friend with the Indian haircut—”

“It's a Mohawk.”

“Okay,” she says and looks down at the >I< logo. “The clothes and the haircuts. It's a lot. But this . . .” She grips the notebook and looks at Packy again.

“My band?” I say.

“Band?” Packy says and looks at my mom. He holds up a hand like he's stopping something. “Okay, that's fine. We're glad you're making friends—”

“It's the letters,” my mom says. She holds the notebook up and lets it flop open to anywhere, pages and pages of writing, doodles, and band logos.

My breath goes short, like when the ball's in the air and you know it's coming to you. Everybody's watching, but it just floats up there and won't come down. You've got plenty of time to think about what will happen if you miss it, if you've misjudged and it gets away from you. My voice pushes out some sound just above a whisper that doesn't sound like me: “You read my letters?”

My mom pats the pillows beside her. “Come sit down.”

“No,” I say, my voice back. “Did you read everything?”

Packy stands up, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand like maybe there's just some sleep in there and not tears. “Son, Uncle Ryan is dead.”

“It's okay,” my mom says. “We all miss him.”

I don't know what they know—the band, Astrid, the things I've said about Packy, all of it, most of it. They know enough. Or they think they do. “So then, what?” I say, pushing my hands deeper into my pockets. “You think I'm out getting drunk and trying to kill myself?”

My mom shakes her head. “There's just so many letters to someone who, someone who isn't . . .”

“I'm not crazy,” I say. “I know Uncle Ryan's dead. And you know what? I know he was drunk and walked in front of that car.” The tears should be streaking down my face now but they're not. “I used to think it was my fault because of the keys, you know? If he'd had his keys he wouldn't have been walking home.”

“Sweetie,” my mom says and pats the pillows beside her again.

“We've told you,” Packy says. “None of it was your fault.”

“I know,” I say and step over and take the notebook from my mom. I hold it up and fan out the pages like I'm trying to get a lost dollar to fall out. “And I haven't told Uncle Ryan that I know whose fault it really was. But I heard everything that night.”

“Reece,” my mom says. “It's more complicated than that.”

I put my eyes on Packy. “We moved here because you guys felt guilty for making Uncle Ryan go home.”

Packy folds his arms, looks at my mom, and steps over to me. “Your uncle Ryan,” he starts, then takes a breath and starts again: “We loved Uncle Ryan. You don't know how hard . . . how many times your Aunt Mary called in the middle of the night or your uncle Ryan just showed up and . . .” And he stops again. “Oh, Reece, if we could go back—”

“But you can't.” I hold the notebook up like it's proof of something. “And you go and make everything worse. You make us leave everyone we know. You're never around. You snoop through my stuff.” I glance at my mom, you know, to make sure she knows she's part of this too, then back at Packy. My hands are shaking, my face is tingling, and now I'm talking loud, just short of a yell. “California can't make everything okay, Packy. It's still your fault Uncle Ryan died. It's always going to be your fault.”

I want it back as soon as it's out of my mouth, even before Packy's slap explodes across my face and he yells, “Stop! You will stop that right now.”

My hand goes to my cheek, my fingers barely touching the hot spot, the sting echoing strong, then less so, then strong again and settling into some rhythm while I stare at the floor.

“Reece,” Packy says soft. His hand cups my shoulder, right on the TSOL patch, and I shake him off without looking up.

I put my hand out in the air in front of me. “Give me my tape.” The hard plastic slides onto my palm and I head for the stairs, listening for Packy's footsteps behind me. But they don't come.

In my room, I kick my shoes onto the floor and slam my jacket
onto the bed. I lie down and bury my face in the jacket, trying to smell Del Taco or maybe the Two-Car Studio. Maybe Edie. But I get none of that and soon I'm bawling like a baby, holding the jacket tighter around my face to muffle the sounds until my head is hot and aches and there's nothing left to do but fall asleep.

T
he smell of coffee surrounds me, invisible and awful. My stomach creaks from hungry-empty to nervous-empty. Packy's downstairs getting ready for a Saturday shift. Sometimes, on weekends, he wakes me up to say good-bye. Not today. As soon as the thud of the front door reaches my room I'm eyes open, clothes on, out the back door, and over the wall into the park.

The ground sucks my shoes in, wet and soft. In the low morning sun, the dew across the soccer fields glares like new snow. At the corner of one field, the grass is thin and worn away so the white out-of-bounds line is painted right onto the dirt. It reminds me of our old front lawn in Jersey. We'd go out and play in the first snow, me and Brendan and my dad too if Uncle Ryan came by, trampling it down so fast the green and brown would come through right away. It wouldn't feel cold at first like you might think, not with all that running around and snowball throwing. But when the wind got blowing good, you felt it
because the cold doesn't care what you're doing or what you're wearing; it finds a way inside you.

I plunge my hands into my jacket pockets, start walking diagonally across the field. It feels good because in California even a little jacket can protect you from everything.

Looking back from the middle of the field, I've painted a dark green stripe everywhere my feet have pushed down the blades of grass, flattening them and spreading out the water. I head diagonally to another corner and stop, making an arrow in the grass, the
D
for the >I< logo.

Running around the outside of the field to the opposite end, I walk diagonally from one corner to the center, then back to the other corner to make the other arrow, the
K.
Then I run around the outside of the field one more time to get back to the center, where I can walk straight across the middle to make the
I.

As I'm backing away across the next field, the lines get clearer and clearer until the >I< logo appears. My Converse are soaked to my socks, but it's perfect. If soccer season was over, it would stay there all morning until the temperature rose and evaporated the dew. DikNixon released into the air instead of getting trampled.

.

Treat's little sister is already up watching cartoons and she lets me in. Treat meets me in the living room, the Mohawk fluffed out like a cat. We sit quiet, watching the shows, and on commercials Jewell tells us about the slumber party she's going to tonight because of our party. Mrs. D gets up and makes real oatmeal with almonds,
brown sugar, and honey, and it fills my stomach like someone's hugging me from inside.

Keith's pretty angry when he shows up around nine thirty because he went to my house and when my mom couldn't find me she wanted to know why I wasn't with him and where were we going so early anyway? “I told her I must have got mixed up and was supposed to meet you at the library, but she didn't look like she believed that.”

Out in the Two-Car Studio, Treat shows us how he sanded the boards last night so there wouldn't be any splinters. He also hammered them together in two long sets to put across the Jacuzzi, except there's no cross boards for support and the nail heads are sticking up everywhere.

“We can't stand on this,” I say.

“That's good wood,” he says.

“It's not the wood.” I squat down to show Treat. “What if we catch a cord on this nail or if the slats come apart in the middle of a song?”

“You got a better idea?”

“Well, for starters we can pull out these nails, get a drill, center little dimples in the wood where the nails go so they're sunk, fill in the rest of each hole with wood putty, and then sand it over so it's nice and smooth.”

Keith squats down next to me. “That's just for starters?”

Treat has Lyle find us everything we need. Then I show Keith and Treat how to pull nails without ruining the boards or the nails, how to bore the dimples with the drill, and how to steady the boards so they won't rattle and cause the nail to go in
crooked. We add crossbeams for support and lean the boards on the Jacuzzi deck while the putty dries.

We need to drain the Jacuzzi, but Treat says we should have a confessional first, for good karma, so me and Keith borrow some shorts from him. Mine come down past my knees and Keith's are to his shins, but Treat's squinty eyed and serious. “Okay,” he says once we're all in. “Who's got one?”

Everything from last night comes back into my head—popular people at the game letting us talk to them like we're in their universe, Edie's thighs, my parents snooping through my stuff, Packy slapping me. I don't say a thing.

Keith isn't talking either, and after looking back and forth at us, Treat says, “Here's what we can do. We'll each ask the other one a question we want to know and your answer is your confessional.”

“What if it's a question we don't want to answer?” Keith says.

“You have to,” Treat says. “Or we won't be in balance.”

I look at Keith. “What if we lie?”

Treat shakes his head. “That'll mess everyone up. So even if you don't care about yourself, you shouldn't do that to your brothers.”

“Brothers?” Keith says.

Treat looks up at the beams over us where he duct-taped three utility lights, one for each one of us tonight. “We're not a band if we don't think of each other like brothers.”

Keith giggles. “Okay.”

Treat splashes a line of water into Keith's face. “If you don't knock it off, I'll be Cain and you'll be Abel.”

Keith nods, his eyes shut, and his nose and chin drip water.

“I thought you were an atheist,” I say and a stream of water hits my face.

“I thought you hated doing projects with your dad.”

“I do.”

Treat nods. “Well, you sure know a lot about home construction, Slugger.”

Keith laughs and I shoot a stream of water at him, then ask Treat, “Do you like algebra?”

“It's all right.”

“You've got, like, a ninety-five in there, right?”

Treat pulls both arms up out of the water, resting them on the sides of the Jacuzzi. “Okay, I get it. You learn stuff even if you don't care.”

“Not me,” Keith says. “I hate algebra and I've only got, like, a seventy-five in there.”

Treat shakes his head. “Who cares who likes what. We're violating the sanctity of the confessional.” We settle down, and when there's just the hum of the jets Treat says, “Okay, Keith, what's your question for me?”

Keith looks at Treat. “Have you ever beat anybody up?”

“Not on purpose,” Treat says, totally straight-faced.

“What does
that
mean?”

“I used to lose control a little. That's all.”

Keith asks if I'm nervous about the party, and just hearing him say it makes my stomach tighten up. “A little. I mean, I know it'll be okay because we'll all be up there—”

“Like brothers,” Treat says.

“Yeah, like brothers. I don't think I could do it otherwise.”

I ask Keith if he's nervous and he says not yet but maybe later.

“How 'bout you, Treat?”

He's tight-lipped, watching the bubbles and then shaking his head. He looks up at Keith, down at the bubbles, then up at Keith again.

“What?” Keith says.

“How long has Cherise liked me?”

Keith shakes his head. “I don't know.”

“Then how long have you been passing notes about me?”

“That's two questions to the same person,” Keith says.

“You didn't give me an answer to the first one.”

Keith looks up, eyes squinty and thinking. “About three or four weeks, I guess.”

Treat looks down at the bubbles like he's calculating his next move. Then he asks me the atomic bomb of questions, the kind where no answer is safe no matter which side of it you're on: “Do you think Cherise is a babe?”

Treat's massive, squared body is leaning forward a little, his Mohawk oozing to one side in the steam. I try to imagine Cherise sitting there next to him, a bikini on her skinny body that shows how nothing really changes from her hips to her shoulders. A rectangle with her springy hair shooting out in every direction so even a ponytail can't hold it. Square and rectangle. “I think you guys would look good together. You know, you mix just right.”

Treat looks me over, then nods like he just got the A he was expecting. He motions me and Keith to the middle of the Jacuzzi,
where we lock arms, making a triangle. Treat holds us in place awhile before finally saying, “Okay, I think we're in balance.”

We drain the Jacuzzi and fit the boards in place over the top. Mrs. D brings out asparagus wraps, which look like brown burritos except they're cold and taste like grass, but we're so hungry we wolf them down and ask for more.

After lunch, we nail the car cover along the back of the deck and Mr. D digs up one more utility light for us to tape up and aim right at the logo. We get the guitars and amps out there and plug everything into an extension cord Mr. D has snaked along the fence, through the garden and rosebushes, and over to the deck.

Back on the patio, we set out coolers and Mr. D brings out the beer. The bottles are brown with some kind of fierce-looking lion on the label, his head and body turned sideways and
Löwenbräu
written in giant blue letters beneath him.

“That's real beer,” I say. “Isn't it?”

“This is their nonalcoholic brew,” Mr. D says.

Keith looks closer at the label. “It won't get us drunk?”

Mr. D shows us the little red ribbon at the bottom of the bottle where it says
Alkoholfrei.
“Not even a little.”

“Will people know?”

Mr. D says if we're worried we can scratch that part off real easy. Then he shows us where it says
Imported from Germany
on the back. “Just tell everyone it's an import. They'll get drunk on that.” He tells Treat he's printed up signs with little skulls on them for every door in the house except the bathroom by the kitchen. “That's the only reason anyone should be in the house.” He says he'll be dropping Jewell off at her slumber party around six, and
then around eight he and Mrs. D will be back from dinner and will go into their room to hang out the rest of the night. “You won't know we're here unless you need us.”

Mr. D opens the glass sliding door and pats the wall inside. “The switch for the lights is right here, Treat. Not the one for the patio light. The one underneath that.”

“I know, Lyle.”

“Okay,” he says, and we hear the click of the switch flipping on. We look across half a soccer field of empty grass leading back to the Jacuzzi deck. Even though it's, like, three o'clock in the afternoon, there's a pale little egg of light on the
K
part of the >I< logo. We walk closer to get a better look, and halfway there we see three more eggs of light hitting the deck, one right next to Keith's amp, half on the deck and half on the wood slats over the Jacuzzi. Another is almost in the middle of the slats, not too far off, and since Treat will be singing through the bullhorn anyway, he can move into that spot real easy. The last egg, where I'll be standing, is on the right, or the left if you're Astrid looking up from the yard.

The deck is gone. It's a stage now, and it makes me wonder how van Doren does it, you know, standing in front of a bunch of people on a patio, or at a bowling alley, or someplace really real like the Whisky. My stomach goes tight and squeezes up to my heart.